131 Year Since the First Sarajevo Tram Was Put into Operation

It has been 131 years since the first tram began running through the streets of Sarajevo, writes the Bosnian news agency Patria (NAP).

From then until today, the service of the most popular urban transport in the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina was interrupted only during the last Serbian aggression against BiH from '92 to '95.

The first tram, pulled by horses, passed through Sarajevo on January 1, 1885. The one-way route was 3.1 km long, and the track started from today's Faculty of Economics, ran along Ferhadija and further down the main city street (today's Titova) across Marindvor, ending at the Narrow Railway Station. The tram could carry 28 people.

The tram was electrified on May 1, 1895. The vehicles used were produced by the German company "Siemens-Schuckertwerke" and were the first trams built in its factories.

Incidentally, Sarajevo is the first city in Europe to have a full-day tram line. It was a test line for the future tram in Vienna. So as not to dig up the streets of Vienna or Pest in vain, the Austro-Hungarians decided to test the "horse railway" - as the tram was then called - first in Sarajevo.

Thus, in the summer of 1884, digging of Sarajevo's streets and laying of tram tracks began. On that occasion, Sarajevo lost one of its most beautiful bridges - a stone bridge that spanned the Koševski stream near Alipašina Mosque, but it also gained the title of the first city in the Balkans and Central Europe to have a tram, writes NAP.